MacBook Pro (2010) Freeze

Here's my experience, seems to me very similar to most of you here, my MBP i5 mid 2010 ramdomly freezes, all I can move is the mouse, but nothing else works, only solution is to force shutdown, this usually happens more frequently at few seconds after booting and the desktop appears, but it also happens during normal operation, but not so often, especially when im with Twitter.app open.

And the other problem I am having lately is waking up from sleep, 40% of the times I try to wake it up from sleep everything turns on but the screen remains black, unninstalled everything I had and no go, it's the same (Running 10.7.3).

One thing that seems strange to me is, I mainly thought it was hardware problem, but then I installed 10.8 Developer Preview 2 (Just to test it) as my main OS (With 10.7 on the other partition), and with 10.8 DP2 the problem is gone! Believe me I tested it for more than 3 weeks of everyday use, so now I don't know what to think of this, the problem does not exist with 10.8, why it does on 10.7 with exactly the same programs installed?!

Normally I use GFX to force Intel Graphic Card, for better battery life, it does the same on "Dynamic Switching"

PS: I checked my logs, it has the "NVDA Channel Exception too, and when the freeze occurs it shows this:

Apr 9 12:33:48 MacBookPro com.apple.dock.extra[197]: Could not connect the action buttonPressed: to target of class NSApplication

Apr 9 12:33:48 MacBookPro com.apple.dock.extra[197]: 2012-04-09 12:33:48.238 com.apple.dock.extra[197:1707] Could not connect the action buttonPressed: to target of class NSApplication

Apr 9 12:33:48 MacBookPro com.apple.dock.extra[197]: Could not connect the action buttonPressed: to target of class NSApplication

Apr 9 12:33:48 MacBookPro com.apple.dock.extra[197]: 2012-04-09 12:33:48.243 com.apple.dock.extra[197:1707] Could not connect the action buttonPressed: to target of class NSApplication

Apr 9 12:33:48 MacBookPro com.apple.dock.extra[197]: Could not connect the action buttonPressed: to target of class NSApplication

Apr 9 12:33:48 MacBookPro com.apple.dock.extra[197]: 2012-04-09 12:33:48.255 com.apple.dock.extra[197:1707] Could not connect the action buttonPressed: to target of class NSApplication

Apr 9 12:33:48 MacBookPro com.apple.dock.extra[197]: 2012-04-09 12:33:48.257 com.apple.dock.extra[197:1707] Could not connect the action buttonPressed: to target of class NSApplication

Apr 9 12:33:48 MacBookPro com.apple.dock.extra[197]: Could not connect the action buttonPressed: to target of class NSApplication

Apr 9 12:33:48 MacBookPro coreservicesd[33]: *** process 33 exceeded 500 log message per second limit - remaining messages this second discarded ***

My pet theory on this is that it is a combination of hardware and software issues. i.e. the hardware occassionally will glitch in communication or whatever for just for an instant - which results in the driver displaying the NVDA channel exception type errors we see in the log - a robust driver could perhaps recover from the glitch and proceed if the hardware is back to normal right away, but Apple's driver for whatever reason cannot.

Because it is a very short/transient glitch, Apple's diagnostic routines rarely if ever detect it. But if they shore up the driver's recovery logic, maybe it can be worked around.

If that is indeed the case, I wish they would have fixed it by now. But if it is fixed in 10.8 I will be happy. For now I just stay in Intel-Only mode almost all the time. 🙂

You may be right about that. For me, the problems *seem* to have begun when I upgraded to Snow Leopard, and only got worse with Lion. For that reason I think a previous post was on to something when he wrote that by downgradeing to 10.5 the freezing goes away. Yet I hardly call that a "fix".

Can you tell me more about Intel-only mode? Are you sure that you've had no freezing while in that mode?

What i Do know is that, in my MBP, no matter if it's selected Dynamic Switching, or Intel only, on lion it freezes, on 10.8 it doesnt that's for sure cause I already tested it for 3 weeks, I mainly use it with "Intel Only" selected thru GFXCardStatus...

Hey people my issue was HARD DISK!!!!

Toshiba 500GB was the culprit...

It starts to reallocate bad blocks... the amount grows with severe work like boot process. I did not shut down until buy a new HD...

I bought a Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid 750GB 7200rpm HD and it's all fine again! 😁

That's very interesting. I had not considered the hard drive. Can you tell me what MBP you have? What year, what model?

Mine can't be that, appart from testing 3 different hard drives with no results, I now have a SSD and the original HD on a superdrive caddy, it does the exact same on both SSD and HD... :S

Mine is a MID 2010 Core i5 2.4GHz, SSD OCZ VERTEX 3

Mine is mid 2010, 500GB 5400rpm HD, 8GB RAM, 17" Glare MBP,

The main problem was beach ball of death even after clean Lion install. Sometimes programs become unresponsive as you click but nothing works after. In my opinion TOSHIBA hard disk is not reliable as it was. Probably Hitachi is more reliable.

If it's freeze completely with no mouse move could be dirty contacts of Memory Card or Processor related. Like you up&down Safari's window and freeze. In this case it's common to have KERNEL PANIC... (black display with a lot of things write)

it's easy to verify its integrity monitoring with any app that reads SMART status of your HD.

I have other suspects about what caused a damage to my HD. I don't move a lot with this notebook. Could be malware or apps like GeekTool that runs graphic resources all time long. I observed on my other MBP that the HD was sticking on every time Adium dock icon/character animate when you receive some message. Proabably these intensive graphic resource make a repetitive read of HD.

Yeah, mine had the Hitachi 320GB hard drive, at first I thought it was the problem too, but I swapped the Hitachi for a Western Digital HD and it was the same, I sincerely hope your problem was the hard drive, but in my case it's not :S I even disabled the "Sudden Motion Sensor" of the hard drive but no go, sometimes the Mac just freezes and the fans start to raise (Sign of a lot of processor activity I think), and it will only go back to normal after a force restart, does this even with the SSD drive... This usualy happens more to me while scrolling on twitter app for example.. Let's hope this doesnt occur on 10.8 final 😀

Do you made a clean install of Lion?

This time I'll not install a lot of apps on each day.

Some apps are very suspicious to me. I think they have a lot of bugs and can eat CPU time.

It's not related with the problem I had but look this: these days I noted with Activity Monitor that newer WACOM tablet drive was consuming more memory than Chrome or Safari... it's impossible to a driver eat so memory. I visited the driver page again some nights after and surprisingly that driver link was dead!!! Last night I visited the page (after I reinstalled my Lion) and WACOM made a freshy driver for my Intuos tablet! Of course they repaired the drive!

Look:

http://www.wacom.com/customercare/Drivers.aspx?model=Intuos3&os=Mac+OS+X

I have the same issue, Apple replaced motherboard (at my cost!), then ran "extensive" tests for a whole week, found nothing and told me to clean install. That didn't help.

I since made videos of every time it happens, but after more "extensive" testing they simply told me that the computer failed but they had no information regarding the error. They told me to cherry-pick the software I install... but it would lock-up or die even on a clean install.

Very unhappy.

Very sorry to hear. They did replace my logic board (for free) and it fixed it.

Do you have the kernel panic logs? Apple looked at mine and saw the nvida error. I had also emailed them to myself every time it happened as well.

Will it stop if you use gfxCardStatus and choose "Intergrated Only"? This made mine work (before the logic board change) but was just a work-around until a fix came out.

Also, did you apply the OSX patches for the issue? (May work for you, but did not for me. Though it made it happen less)

Hope they get it fixed for you.

Can you explain the gfxCardStatus workaround? I'm not sure where to find it.

Jayhole: For many of us with this issue, the screen will only freeze if the discrete Nvida GPU is running, gfxCardStatus lets you force the integrated Intel GPU to be running all the time instead of dynamically switching between the two. It also lets you easily switch between modes:

http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus

Creat: how did you open an issue with Apple about it, did you take it into a genius bar?

Not to me, to me it happens always on Intel GPU, I rarelly use Nvidia, but I think it happened with Nvidia to me once too...